FilmBase 1.5: the biggest release since version 1

Until now, FilmBase ran on one machine. You broke down the script, built the budget, laid out the stripboard on your computer, and if someone else needed to see it, you exported a PDF or passed the project file around.

That’s over. FilmBase 1.5 makes the whole project shared. Invite your team and everyone works on the same budget, schedule, script, and breakdown at once. The producer tweaks the budget while the 1st AD reworks the schedule and the script supervisor tags the breakdown, and each person watches the others’ changes land as they happen. No exporting, no emailing versions, no “wait, which copy is current?”

It’s the biggest release since version 1.

Image: the whole team editing one project at once

Private, straight over your own network

Your team works on the same project at the same time, peer-to-peer, over your own network. Changes go straight from one machine to another. Nothing touches a server, nothing lands in the cloud, and there’s no account to set up. The project data stays between your computers, full stop.

It’s the fast way too, because there’s no server in the middle to wait on. Type on one machine and it shows up on the others. The trade is that everyone has to be online on the same network at the same time, which is exactly what you want on a closed set, where the project isn’t allowed to leave your machines in the first place.

Working across cities

Team spread across locations? Put everyone on one virtual network with an overlay service like ZeroTier. It bridges your machines onto a single virtual LAN, so FilmBase discovers and syncs between them as if you were all in the same room. Same speed, same privacy, still nothing sitting in the cloud.

Add your team, set what they can touch

Everyone first joins the same FilmBase network. One person opens the new Team → Network page, creates a network, names it, and sets a password if they want one. Everyone else on the same network sees it listed, clicks to join, and they’re on. Now they show up under Team → Members, and you invite them with one click. The invite lands in their Project Hub, they accept, done. No email, nothing on a server.

From there, admins decide what each person can see and edit: budget, schedule, script, rate cards, or the right to manage other members. People only see the sections they’re given, so you can hand an accountant the budget or a 1st AD the schedule without opening up the rest of the production.

Real-time, across the app

Sync runs through the whole app, not one screen:

• Budget: line items, fringes, globals, currencies, expenses.
• Schedule: stripboard, shooting blocks, call sheets, day-out-of-days.
• Script: paragraph edits and scene inserts, deletes, and merges flow through live, across the Editor, Breakdown, Shotlist, Storyboard, Magic Sheet, and Sides.
• Breakdown: tag an element on your machine and it lights up on everyone else’s.

If two people change the same thing at once, the newer edit wins instead of the two values fighting each other. Attached files ride along too, so expense invoices and storyboard images sync with the data, and big files upload in the background and pick up where they left off if the connection drops.

Chat, right in the project

Every project gets its own chat under Team → Chat. Keep the notes and the decisions next to the work instead of buried in a group text. Your messages look different from everyone else’s, Enter sends, and it’s all timestamped.

Change history, with a real undo button

Once a whole team can edit a project, you need to see what changed and put it back if it went wrong. So 1.5 records the history.

Every edit to the budget, schedule, script, and breakdown is saved with its before and after. A teammate’s change shows up under their name, not yours. You can always tell who did what, and when.

Open Team → History (admins only), browse newest first, filter by person or date, and revert. One entry or a stack of them. If a teammate has since touched the same thing, FilmBase stops and warns you instead of quietly steamrolling their work.

We kept the feed readable, too. A bulk action like a script import or a pasted block collapses into one event instead of three hundred rows, and the routine renumbering after a scene edit is hidden so it doesn’t bury what actually matters. Move a strip on the stripboard and the entry says “Moved Scene 12 (INT. POLICE STATION) to position 4”, not a row ID. You can switch history off or set how long it’s kept in Global Settings.

Image: the change history feed with a revert button

The schedule optimizer thinks like a 1st AD

The stripboard optimizer targets the numbers a production actually counts. Under the hood it minimizes company moves — so each location gets shot out in as few days as the schedule allows — and each cast member’s hold days, the expensive gap between their first day on set and their last.

Two sliders decide the trade-off. One balances keeping each location shot out against evening the page count across days. The other sets how hard to squeeze a performer’s days together. Both read as a percentage, so a setup you like is easy to repeat, and the Locations, Balanced and Actors buttons just move the sliders for you. Hit Optimize and the board arranges itself around the cost that matters most to you.

Set caps that can’t all be met and you’ll know before it runs. Too many night pages for your page-per-day limit once day and night are kept apart? The panel does the arithmetic and tells you up front, instead of churning for a minute and handing back nothing.

There’s also a Use All Shoot Days switch, on by default. You configured twelve days, you get a twelve-day schedule, not everything crammed into the first six. Flip it off and the optimizer answers the opposite question: could this shoot fit in fewer days?

And because an optimizer you can’t undo is an optimizer you’ll never trust, Ctrl+Z brings your old board back exactly as it was.

Image: the stripboard after a one-click optimize

Your schedule writes the labour budget

This is the part we’re proudest of. Labour is most of a film budget and the part that never sits still, so 1.5 wires the schedule straight into the budget instead of making you keep the two in sync by hand.

Add a character to the detailed budget and FilmBase reads their Day out of Days and builds the line for you: work days, hold days, travel, rehearsals, and fittings, each priced at its own rate from the actor’s rate card or their contact. Add a rehearsal day on the Day out of Days and the budget re-prices itself. No second pass, no “did anyone update the budget after the schedule moved?”

Crew works off something we haven’t seen anywhere else: a per-person Crew Schedule. It’s a grid where you set each unit member’s prep, shoot, travel, hold, and wrap days. Import a crew member, or a whole department, into the budget and their days come straight from that grid. Give the gaffer an extra prep week and the gaffer’s budget line grows to match, on the spot.

Rates come from where they already live, the person’s contact or a rate card, so you set a day rate once and never re-key it. Override a number by hand and your override survives the next re-sync. The connection fills the gaps; it doesn’t bulldoze your judgement.

This is the bit that usually lives in three spreadsheets and a week of re-typing. Now it’s one connected thing: change the plan, watch the number move.

Image: a crew member's budget line, built from their Crew Schedule days

The deal, not just the day rate

A day rate is the easy case, and real deals aren’t all daily. Someone’s on a weekly, someone negotiated a flat fee for the whole shoot, a third is on a monthly. 1.5 bills each person the way you actually struck the deal — daily, weekly, monthly, or a flat once-off.

Weekly is where it gets clever. Put a day player on auto-convert and FilmBase watches the schedule: work a full week back-to-back and it rolls up to the weekly rate on its own, while the odd leftover days bill by the day, capped so a partial week never costs more than a full one. Negotiated a straight weekly instead? Switch to pro-rata and half a week is half the week’s rate. What counts as a “week” — five days, six — comes from your own unit settings, and a project-wide default keeps the whole show consistent while any one person can override it.

It’s the day-to-weekly conversion crews already do in their heads and the plain pro-rata split, both, chosen per person, priced from the schedule.

Fringes that land where they should

Fringes are where budgets quietly go wrong. 1.5 puts them where they belong: on the wage days, never on the reimbursements. Per diem, kit rental, housing, and airfare sit outside the fringe, the way they’re actually paid — and a capped fringe, pension and health with a cutoff say, is taken against a person’s total wages rather than each day line, so the cap comes out right instead of applying once per row. Need to include or exclude one line by hand? Right-click it.

There’s a Fringe Summary on the budget now too, totalling every fringe across the whole show, so you can see at a glance what each one is costing you before you commit to it.

Rates that follow the person

Every contact keeps their own rates, and the fringes on their deal, right on their card — and those follow them into the budget. Copy a specific role’s rates and fringes, or a particular agency person’s, onto a contact in one step, offered only the cards that fit them: cast cards for cast, crew for crew. And on any cast or crew line, flip the unit between day, week, and month and it pulls that person’s matching rate. Type a number to override it and it stays put until you clear the field.

Budgets are harder to typo

Film budgets die by a thousand small entry mistakes, so 1.5 closes some doors. Rate cells take digits and one decimal point, so type “2..5” and the second dot just doesn’t appear. “1.5” and “1,5” both mean one and a half, and “1,234.56” and “1.234,56” both parse, because your crew won’t all punctuate numbers the same way. A formula row that can’t be evaluated now wears a red warning icon instead of quietly showing zero. That’s the difference between a visible problem and money you don’t notice is missing.

See who you’re really paying

Your budget is filed by department, but money doesn’t move that way. One rental house can sit in your camera, grip, and lighting accounts at the same time. Cost by Supplier, tucked into the filter dropdown, adds up every vendor across all of them and shows you the total, with the per-account breakdown underneath. It’s the number you want in front of you before you call that vendor about a package rate. Pull a supplier’s items in with Add from Supplier and they show up here.

And the script editor got sharper

While we were in there:

• Cleaner scene deletes. Delete a heading and the content folds into the scene above. Select a whole scene and delete to drop it entirely. Both undo cleanly, and everything renumbers on the spot.
• Numbers that stay right. Insert or delete a scene and the numbering fixes itself immediately, down to the first scene’s number the moment you type its heading.
• A Scene Tags toggle on every page. Now that breakdown tags sync, each script page has a switch for them in its Show/Hide menu, on by default where you tag and off where you don’t.

Storyboards that draw themselves

Add a shot and, before anyone picks up a pencil, FilmBase sketches the frame for you. Every shot without its own image gets a clean, hand-drawn diagram of the framing, and it actually reflects the shot. The size sets how tight it frames. The camera angle restages the whole frame, so a high angle tilts the view, a Dutch angle cants it, and a bird’s-eye looks straight down at the ground.

Right-click to set how many people are in the shot, whether they’re standing, sitting at a table, or in a car, and whether you’re inside or out. It reads the interior or exterior from the scene heading, and you can override it. Several characters get blocked with depth instead of lined up flat. Change a shot’s pose or cast count on the shot list and the storyboard sketch updates at once — it’s the same shot in both places. Drop in your own art any time and it takes over. Either way it exports to your storyboard and shot list at a clean 16:9.

Image: auto storyboard sketches for a scene's shots

Every report from one place

The whole budget reporting family now exports from a single dialog with a live preview, so a report you open from the Reports hub looks exactly like the one from its own page. Alongside the Top Sheet, Detailed Budget and Cost Report, there’s a two-scenario Budget Comparison, Income vs Expenditure, Expense Transactions, an above/below-the-line breakdown, plus the Payment Schedule and Cashflow with a date-range picker.

Save your favourite setups as presets and pick one from a dropdown next time. Zoom the preview to check the fine print before you send. And the Excel exports calculate themselves now. Each line is quantity times rate, with categories and totals that sum on their own, laid out to match the PDF.

Image: the report dialog with a live preview

Your name on the paperwork

Reports used to say what we wanted them to say. Now they say what you want. Upload your production company’s logo and the show’s logo once, in the project settings, and every PDF that leaves FilmBase carries them: budgets, cost reports, schedules, call sheets, even the contact list. Each export dialog lets you size and place them, and the choice you make in one dialog carries to all the others. Set it up once and forget it.

The “Generated by” line and the footer note work the same way. Type your own text in any export dialog and that’s the text on every export from then on.

The contact list export grew up too. It matches the design of every other report now, and it can carry each person’s rates in your project’s actual currency, their character, address, notes, and banking details when you need a payment run (off by default for the copies you hand around).

Make it yours

Pick the accent colour that runs through the whole app, the default teal or blue, purple, amber, rose, or a neutral grey, and it carries across buttons, highlights and the active view. Switch the selected item in the sidebar between a filled pill and a softer tint, set a profile photo (or let your initials stand in), and FilmBase looks the way you want before you start.

Sign in your way, open anywhere

A password is now optional. Set one and FilmBase asks for it when you open the app; leave it off and you go straight to your work. On a machine you trust, “Remember me on this device” skips the prompt until you sign out.

Your projects aren’t tied to one computer either. Copy or move a project to another machine and open it there, with nothing to set up. When you start a project you can give it its own password, or share it freely so anyone you send it to can open it.

Try it

Open a project, head to Team, invite your first teammate, and you’re working together — privately, straight over your own network, with nothing in the cloud.

We built this for how small crews actually run: tight schedules, sensitive material, and no time to babysit file versions. Go break something, then put it back.

Thanks for using FilmBase. Got opinions on collaboration? Tell us.